


Five Moments to Define a Dream of Flying

by BethCGPhoenix



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, five things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-27
Updated: 2007-01-27
Packaged: 2017-10-14 07:59:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/147099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BethCGPhoenix/pseuds/BethCGPhoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We are each a product of our own experiences. Peter's no different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Moments to Define a Dream of Flying

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Batya as an extremely belated Hanukkah gift. Many thanks to Aspen and Becca for betaing!

**(1)**  
Peter Petrelli throws himself off the top of the monkey bars on his second day of kindergarten. He bites clean through the corner of his bottom lip, cracks one of his front teeth in half, and spends forty minutes in the nurse's office spitting up blood, sobbing for his brother the whole time. Five minutes before the ambulance and ten minutes after their parents, Nathan shows up; he doesn't say a word, but he helps press a wad of tissues to Peter's mouth, squeezes his hand, and never stops glaring at him.

It takes five stitches to sew up his lip. The tooth grows back, eventually, but there's nothing anybody can do about the severed nerves; Peter smiles crookedly for the rest of his life.

He never forgets what it felt like before he hit the gravel covering the bottom of the playground: that weightless hovering, like the clouds were inches above him, like he could see the curve of the earth in the distance if he just squinted a little harder.

  


**(2)**  
Three years later, with the pale pink dent still clearly visible on Peter's mouth, Nathan's appendix bursts in the middle of a calculus exam. When he finds out, Peter begs their mother to take him along when she goes to the hospital. He can't do much except hover next to Nathan's bed and ignore his brother's acidic remarks about him being a nuisance, but he sticks around anyway, to the point where Angela has to drag him out by the collar of his shirt when visiting hours end.

It probably doesn't help that he spends as much time peppering the attendant nurses with questions as he does talking to Nathan.

 _You guys know how to make stuff better, right?_ he asks, hands perched on the bedrail like twin birds. _How?_

  


**(3)**  
His progress reports from high school read like the most minimal variations on a single theme. _Quiet and inattentive,_ each one begins; _prone to daydreaming, consistently known to seat himself as far away from the front of the classroom as possible._ ( _Which comes in handy when he invariably begins paying more attention to the window than the lesson_ , continues his tenth-grade history teacher with a sardonic tilt to her pen.) A few make passing mention of his surprising aptitude for chemistry and math. With his 2.93 GPA and lack of extracurriculars, though, Peter's rendered a dismally average scholar.

 _Mr. Petrelli has a great amount of potential as a student, but unfortunately, he has yet to realize it,_ close the reports from English, from computer science, from physics and P.E. and American government. _I believe that if he only put forth the effort, he could become exceptional._

Peter hears about this after he graduates, and soon enough, he believes it, too.

  


**(4)**  
The dreams start halfway through nursing school, though it takes a little longer for Peter to be able to remember them on a regular basis. There's one in particular that he never quite shakes: he's bumping into people on a crowded sidewalk, and with each person he hits, a translucent line spins out between them. It can pass through solid objects -- even other people -- but it never breaks. By the time he wakes up, he has a foot-thick bundle of them wrapped around his hands.

There are others that've stuck with him, too, but if you ask what they are, he'll just shrug and pull his mouth into a lopsided grin. Not every dream fits neatly into waking vocabulary.

  


**(5)**  
He's twenty-six years old, and every distinct memory he possesses is weaving together to form this: a fifteen-story building, Peter high above, Nathan far below. _It's my turn to be somebody now, Nathan!_ he calls down from the rooftop.

Whatever Nathan yells in reply bends away on the high whirling of autumn wind in New York. Peter spreads his arms, closes his eyes, and takes a step forward onto nothing, plummeting to the ground.

The shock of buoyancy hits just before he does.

And even if it doesn't last, Peter, in the few remaining seconds before he gives out, knows it to be truth.


End file.
